In 2022, Taj Matumbi was selected by the Arts + Literature Laboratory to be one of two ‘emerging’ artists in the Bridge Work program. Since 2017, the program has offered a unique opportunity for young creatives to join a collegial, supportive network of artists and mentors. In a state like Wisconsin, which consistently ranks between 48th and 50th in the nation for state support for arts and culture, Bridge Work creates a crucial stepping stone for artists to find community, recognition, and further opportunities. The ALL branch of the program requires that artists – either self-taught or academically trained – who are living in Dane County arrive with energy and readiness to move into the next stage of their careers.
Taj Uhuru Matumbi may not yet be a household name, but with a solo show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art DTN under his belt, paintings in permanent collections of several museums, and an upcoming exhibition in Minneapolis this fall, it is fair to say he has ‘emerged’ into a very exciting and productive phase.
In April, Matumbi sat down with Jessica Becker to discuss how he got to this place, what he’s inspired by right now, and how he feels about being an artist in the Midwest.
In 2023, Matumbi had a solo show called Hot House at the Milwaukee satellite gallery of the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA). The webpage from the show explains his style as walking the “line between formal abstraction and figuration,” and says his paintings build “tension in the figure-ground relationship by employing vibrant color blocks with sketchy overlapping borders.”
I hadn’t seen any of Matumbi’s art in person, so when we met over Zoom in early April, he walked me through a PDF of the new catalog that has been published by the Paul R. Jones Museum for his solo exhibition called A Spiel, which is on view now. Looking through the 20 carefully curated paintings, I felt like a special guest on a private tour with the California-born, Midwest-proud artist. He was easy to talk to, eloquent about his ideas and inspiration, and quick to give thanks to his teachers and supporters.
Matumbi started the introduction to his most recent collection by saying, “I'm very much a process-based painter.” Even though I was looking at photos of art through a computer screen, the images were immediately intriguing. They have a heaviness, but are also playful and accessible, like a child’s drawing. Bold shapes and colors exude a kind of joy and freedom found through creativity at any age.
The title of the exhibit is the German word for ‘game’ and comes from the word for play, spielen. Giving it an anglophone twist by blending the German with English, “A Spiel” excited Matumbi as a way to honor both his influences and the ideas that had informed his creative process. “It came to me in the shower,” Matumbi said, but went on to explain, “this body of work is me kind of paying homage to my child self.”
Matumbi was among the first cohort of kids to attend a new Waldorf school that was started by friends of his parents in Northern California. Waldorf schools originated in Germany and are based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. It’s a style of education in which students are given space to develop “at their own pace.”
“Parts of my childhood were very great,” he went on, “but for better or worse, I think my innocence was lost sooner than I’d have liked. I was very much a free-range hippie kid and there wasn’t that much supervision.” Without the structure of a fixed curriculum, he says, “I kind of fell flat. I didn’t get certain things that you should learn in primary school.” He says that while he struggled in some subjects, art classes felt like “a safe haven.” As an adult, he is now breaking free of some of the “fixed mindsets” he had about himself as a kid. “I don’t really know that much about Rudolf Steiner,” he explained, “but I do think that we all have our own natural ways of developing and things have a way of working themselves out.”
He told a story about when he was living in Iowa as a college student. Listening to auctioneers taking bids on a foreclosed house, he started thinking about the “kind of hustle” that is a part of American culture. “You can’t really have your innocence or you’ll get taken advantage of. You have to be careful. So, you know, [A Spiel] is really about imagining a world where I have armor, where I can protect myself. These characters symbolize a sense of confidence and pride and resilience. All these paintings kind of make me feel safe.”
Matumbi came to Madison in 2018 and graduated from UW-Madison in 2021. During the Covid pandemic, while in graduate school, he started drawing again. He said it felt like he was channeling his younger self — the kid who got into graffiti and was eventually sent to boarding school, but also that kid who had “a natural knack for knitting and fiber arts” and loved the freedom he found skateboarding with his older brothers.
It was as a grad student that he developed a technique that evolved into the works in A Spiel. He would copy his drawings with paint pens to make multiple versions. Then he would “play around” by cutting them up and making collages. Next he would “blow the drawings up” onto a canvas and then “respond to it” as a painting. “Each previous decision kind of leads to the next move,” he explained.
“My parents had high hopes for me,” Matumbi said smiling. His father was interested in reclaiming his African identity apart from the slave narrative taught in American history. “My dad changed his last name to Matumbi, which means ‘born again,’ and he gave me and my brothers names with a lot of meaning. My first name means ‘crown.’ My middle name, ‘Uhuru,’ means ‘freedom.’”
Like his father, Matumbi chooses words deliberately. He has titled his works after James Baldwin quotes, slave songs, and a favorite Kendrick Lamar song ("Element"). “Titles are really important to me,” he explained. “They can give an access point to the viewer.”
Sometimes described as an identity artist, I was curious how he felt about this categorization. He responded by sharing, “You know, I work in fine dining. A part of being a waiter is very much a performance. For example, we have to recite the specials every day. I think we all perform on some level in our day-to-day lives. So conceptually, I’ve been thinking about the idea of identity as being a performance.”
He went on to say, “I was advised in undergrad to just classify myself as an artist, not as a Black artist or whatever. And I didn’t understand the advice then. But now that I have commercial representation (by Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, Alabama), I see how it can be challenging to have to process continually and think about things that you don’t always want to think about.”
He went on to say, “I’m thinking more about art history now. I’m processing my own life, psychological things, and am less focused on specific racial issues in American history.”
The paintings that were exhibited in the Bridge Work show at ALL in 2022 were made during a time when he was processing his personal history as a part of something much larger. “I have always loved European art,” he told me. “For those pieces, I created a world where I was royalty – European royalty and African royalty. That body of work has been the genesis of all the work I’ve made since.”
We talked about what it feels like to be from California and to have lived in the Midwest now for over a decade. He said, “I had family in Chicago and when I was a kid, I just thought they sounded funny when they talked. My only reference to Iowa before moving there was the movie Field of Dreams. We watched it in Saturday School.”
After two years of boarding school in a small town in Iowa, Matumbi earned a BFA in ceramics and painting from Maharishi International University before moving to Madison for graduate school at the University of Wisconsin for an MFA in painting and drawing. Matumbi is grateful for the people he’s met and the support he’s received. “My professors helped me to feel at home here, and they showed me what a studio practice looks like, but also what a life looks like, you know, and how to commit to making art. They showed me how much joy and pleasure that can bring. Being in the Midwest, which gets undervalued and overlooked, is a little like being on the frontier. But I feel like I can be part of the art history narrative here.”
“The art community can feel really insular when you are in school,” he went on. “It’s like Madison doesn't exist outside of the UW campus when you are a student.” He credits the Bridge Work program for helping him “see beyond the university.” He says that being around artists of all different backgrounds, and people working in creative fields, helped him develop professionally and creatively.
“A lot of artists leave Madison because they don’t see enough opportunities,” Matumbi continued, “and the crux of the Bridge Work program is to give artists resources and connect Midwest artists and make our community a little bit smaller. It has helped me to navigate this stage of my life and my art practice. The people at ALL work their butts off to create a community. And it worked, you know. I’m still here.”
One thing seems to lead to another, he believes, and this fall he’ll have an exhibit of new works at Soo Visual Arts Center. Matumbi admitted to having had some “paralysis” recently, saying he’s been overthinking things since finishing work for A Spiel. But a visit to see one of his UW-Madison professors, Fred Stonehouse, exhibit at MOWA inspired him to return to a project that has been on the back burner for a while.
“During grad school, people would always leave books at my studio door. That’s how I got this book called Black Frontiers: A History of African American Heroes in the Old West,” Matumbi told me as he held the book in front of the Zoom screen. “Just last week, I started drawing portraits. I hadn’t really done that in a while. So we’ll see how the show develops. I am really interested in the challenges Black people faced after the Civil War ended. I find it to be really inspiring to imagine them as heroic action figures! So that’s what I’m excited about and I’m just trying to have fun with it.”
For Madison-area readers, be sure to see Matumbi’s work as part of the 2025 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Every three years, this comprehensive show exhibits both new and established artists to showcase the richness and variety of artistic expression in Wisconsin. The show opens on May 2nd and runs through September 14, 2025.
